Center for Disease Control preliminary data shows a pronounced decline in drug overdose deaths throughout Ohio—one that started in 2023 and seems to be the first significant fall since 2018.
It's likely welcome news to health professionals in a state that saw the second highest percentage of opioid overdose deaths in the nation in 2016 and 2017. Ohio was among the states on that grim list for most of the 2010s.
Dennis Cauchon, the founder and president of Harm Reduction Ohio, pulls Ohio Department of Health mortality data almost daily. For nearly seven years, Cauchon said he’s been tracking the provisional data that gives a picture of the state's drug overdose deaths. He thought at first the downward trend was because of a methodology change.
“It would have been just like small numbers—just, instead of 40 deaths in September, it was like 20, and so it wasn't enough to go on,” Cauchon said in an interview Wednesday.
But by early 2024, when that line still arched downward, Cauchon said the data was showing him what he wanted to see. Historically, he said he's seen incremental changes, but these changes did not look incremental.
“When I realized it wasn’t a quirk, it made me cry, because every one of these deaths is a story with children and loved ones,” Cauchon said. “They’re all stories to me. They're not just numbers.”
Ohio isn't the only state that saw the sudden decline, according to NPR. Although overdose deaths have been hiking for years, sometimes by double-digits, the CDC numbers show a more than 10% year-over-year drop from April 2023 to April 2024.
The Ohio Department of Health is still finalizing its numbers for 2023, meaning the 2024 data is far off in the future. There is a monthslong lag between when the state department first forwards death certificates to the CDC and when it finalizes its mortality database for the year.
In a statement, a department spokesperson said it is too early to analyze 2024 numbers.
“The preliminary data for 2023 is encouraging, and it appears Ohio will have a second straight year of declining overdose deaths,” the spokesperson wrote. “While the numbers are promising, our work is certainly not finished, and we must continue the fight to stem the tide of opioid addiction in our state.”
Right now, it's hard for researchers to pinpoint a clear reason, according to NPR. Some cite the wider availability of naloxone and other addiction disorder medications.
Others, like Cauchon, wonder if it has more to do with less fentanyl in drugs flowing across the border, particularly as the U.S. Department of Justice pursues cases against the Mexican Sinaloa Cartel.
“I would like it to be what we're doing with naloxone,” Cauchon said. “Ohio's doing a lot of good things to reduce overdose deaths, but it's important to remember this is not an incremental change so attributing it to incremental things that we're doing doesn't make sense.”
The Ohio Department of Health is finalizing its 2023 report, but the 2022 report can be found here.
Copyright 2024 The Statehouse News Bureau